Note 6 — Front matter

The source of the canon is, indeed, now a riddle. Its ascription to the synod of Ancyra, which the Middle Age never questioned, is now known to be a mere blunder. But, from its first appearance, in the collection of Regino at the close of the ninth century, it became the recognized dictum of the Canon Law upon this subject, and remained unimpeached, even by those who devoted chapters to explaining it away, until after the Reformation. It surely was no accident that it came to light at the end of the same century in which Agobard wrote. Bishop Burchard, of Worms (d. 1025), who followed Regino as a collector of ecclesiastical law, and gave a whole book of his “Decreta” to decisions “De incantatoribus et auguribus,” sets the canon Episcopi at its head. But this prominence in order it lost in the later compositions.